Pre-agreement in place to extend the ERTE until the end of May

May 31st is the new date agreed by the Government, Employers Associations and unions for the extension of the ERTE, according to the pre-agreement reached this morning, Friday, by all the parties in their first meeting to address this issue. The current ERTE period for coronavirus ends on January 31st and it is the express will of all to extend this mechanism beyond the end of the current State of Alarm, which expires on May 9^th.

The Minister of Labour, Yolanda Díaz, asked that the negotiation deadlines not be stretched out as has happened on other occasions. She urged that the negotiation not go beyond January 15th. In her opinion, ERTEs are a tool that is working "very well", which have been endowed with "enormous flexibility", but pointed out that there needs to be "more simplicity".

The president of the union CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, said earlier, that in his opinion the ERTE must be extended until at least June and that companies must be able to take out some staff, not all, so that they have flexibility to rebuild.

"Whether we like it or not, there will have to be staff adjustments, companies have solvency problems," said the president of the employer's association, who stressed that there are 300,000 hospitality establishments closed or with minimal activity, in many cases by administrative order, for which the State should compensate them.

The general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, said in a press conference that “the ERTE should be extended until the pandemic ends. We would not have wanted to get to January with this issue, we wanted to have solved it in September because the ERTEs have to last as long as the pandemic lasts and consequently the extensions should be automatic," he said.

Currently, more than 755,000 people continue to receive a temporary employment regulation file, a figure that is far from the 3.4 million employees who came to be in an ERTE in April, peak of the pandemic, but which has Since September almost unchanged due to the various restrictions on mobility and economic activity that have been decreed in the communities to face the second wave of the virus.

The Canary Islands has the highest number of employees in ERTE than any other autonomous region of Spain, with over 80,000 people still benefitting from the system.

The Government, employers’ representatives, and unions will meet again on Monday to start the negotiation process for a final agreement.